


sunglasses and bloody boxcutters

by Rainbowfunnk



Series: it 2017 [2]
Category: IT - Stephen King, IT 2017
Genre: Confusion, M/M, Pining, Soulmate AU, both stan and rich dont like the idea of soulmates, except they do, not like gay confusion like hes just.confused, stans pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 19:12:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12894843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainbowfunnk/pseuds/Rainbowfunnk
Summary: stan knows how soulmates work: if when you look into the eyes of your soulmate, your colorblindness fades, and everything erupts into saturation. Stan wears sunglasses. He doesnt want to meet his soulmate.then he meets richie. richie wears sunglasses.





	sunglasses and bloody boxcutters

Stanley Uris learns what a soulmate is when he's in second grade. They gathered all of the kids from his elementary school class into one room and put on a video. It’s boring, a poorly produced cartoon about how to find your soulmate.

“. and in your search for your soulmate, remember to B-I-M: Be friendly, introduce yourself, and most importantly-” The weird little cartoon man looks directly at the camera. Stan thinks is face is creepy. “Make eye contact!”

Stan doesn't like this video. He hugs his knees to his chest and tries not to think about it. He's been told these things before. That when you look into the eyes of your soulmate, the one you're supposed to be with forever, the world will erupt into color. Stan isn't sure he believes that, and he can't imagine what color looks like. Hes heard it described in many different ways, that it's like a wild eruption all at once, others say it slowly fades to light. Stan thinks this video is stupid. He doesn't understand why people can't just decide who they wanna be with. His teacher, Mrs Gates, pulls a big poster board off of the wall and sets it in front of the chalkboard. It’s two big gray circles. Well, everything was some shade of grey to Stan. His teacher flashes an obnoxiously peppy smile. Mrs Gates is a young teacher with glossy,light colored hair and long eyelashes.  
“Okay class, can anyone see the difference between these two circles?”

The class shifts for a few seconds before one eager girls hand shoots in the air. A tall, lanky girl named Sydney that Stan didn't really know. Mrs Gates smile falters as she looks around. “Anyone else?”

Cautiously, another hand shakily rises from the back of the room. Another little girl named Marissa peeks out from her mess of dark hair and looks around. Stans teacher grins, calling her up to the front of the class. Marissa is cracking her knuckles. Before the teacher can even say anything, Marissa is pointing right at Sydneys face.  
“I don't want her to be my soulmate,” she frowns, knuckles balling. “I hate her.”

A wave of silence falls over the class. Stan is biting his fingernails. Everyone watches in horror as Sydney begins to wail, tripping over her own feet and running out of the class. Hell breaks loose as everyone begins yelling, and Stans poor teacher is stressfully trying to wrangle everyone back to some kind of peace. Stan doesn't move, though. He continues to hug his knees to his chest. Maybe soulmates weren't such a good thing.

He goes home that night with a refrence sheet of colors. It looks like nothing but a few boxes of vague, dead grey nothing. He frowns before he rips the paper apart, pulling out the box that reads, “red” and making sure the label is no longer visible. He stomps down the wooden stairs until he reaches the living room, where his mother is sitting in her chair reading a book. He sticks the tiny piece of paper right in her face. She lowers her book to scold him for interrupting her, but before she can get a word in he asks,  
“What color is this?”

She gets a nervous look, eyes flickering to his father, who's sitting at the kitchen table writing a letter. She gives Stan a dead-eyed, plastic smile.

“Oh, Stanley, thats a lovely shade of purple…”

She doesn't sound convincing at all. Stan crumbles it in his fist before turning and stomping back up the steps. His mother would never admit it, but the colors in her vision had been fading since stanley was just a toddler.

Stan doesn't do any of his homework that night. It was incredibly out of character for him, but he didn't care. He pulled down the stairs to the attic, wincing at the creaking of metal on metal as they hit the wooden floorboards with a clunk. He waits for a moment, listening for a second for one of his parents to come stomping up the stairs to ask him what he's doing, but when it doesn't come, he clicks on his flashlight and clunks his way up the steps. 

The attic smells like dust and mold. It's dark and looks like those creepy mansions in scary movies he and Bill sneak from Bill's parents sometimes. Stan looked around for a moment. It's hot and arid, and he pulls his shirt over his nose. There was a few pieces of old furniture sitting around, some boxes of old photos, a couple of trash bags full of old clothes. Stan shuffles to the corner, where a decently sized chest sits. It was originally painted with some kind of smooth, glaze paint. Its now flaking off in dead particles on the floor. On a metal plaque pressed into the wood on top is inscribed ‘Donald Uris”. Stan points his flashlight to it, prying it open in rusty hinges, almost falling back as the lid hits the wooden floor with a thump. Stan kneels down, holding his light above his head as he shuffles through the dirty and worn out contents. A lot of old, yellowed documents Stan didn't feel inclined to look at, a few old boxes of matches from various weddings, funerals and other events (Stan pocketed one. He could sell it to the fourth graders that smoke behind the school in the mornings for a shiny, new pack of bubble gum). Finally, after his hands got covered in a thin layer of dirt and soot from whatever ancient items were buried in there. Inside a tiny, black velvet bag is a pair of heavy wayfarer style sunglasses. The lenses are incredibly opaque. He slips them on. Their clearly made for an adult, not Stans small, second-grader sized head. They teeter to the side a bit and one of the stems seems to be coming loose. He dug into the bottom of the chest once again and pulled out a glasses repair kit. He pulls out one of the tiny tools and screws it back into place before once again adjusting them to his face. His father never wore sunglasses, he never really had the need to, but Stan remembers seeing him toss these into the chest as his parents were putting things into storage a few months ago. He's lucky he remembered.

Stan cleans the grime off of them with the fabric of his shirt and tries to walk out wearing them. He stumbles in the dark, now even worse by the heavy lenses, and stubs his foot on a random box. He almost falls down the stairs as he makes his way back down. He fumbles with the doorknob of his bedroom. They grey on grey on grey on grey already made it hard to differentiate things sometimes, but now it was also ten shades darker. Stan laid down on his bed, looking up at the ceiling. Sunglasses had since become taboo in their society. Any kind of interference between eye contact was essentially forbidden. Unless they were perfectly clear glasses, any interference between two eyes making contact would distort your contact with our soulmate. Even colored contacts were a no. Stan rolls onto his side, and the glasses dig into his head. He would get used to it.

The next day, he walks to school wearing his sunglasses. He enters the building, he sits down, and waits for Mrs.Gates to start class. Before it begins, she kneels beside him with an uneasy look in her eyes.

“Stanley, dear, would you like to take those sunglasses off?”

Stan pursed his lips. 

“No.”

Mrs.Gates opens her mouth to say something, but he cuts her off. “I checked the rules. I'm allowed to wear them.”  
She gives him a sad look.

“Stanley, dear, if you wear those sunglasses you won't be able to find your soulmate. You want to find your soulmate, don't you?”

When Stan doesn't say anything back, she pats his shoulder. “I'm not going to make you take them off, dear…”

She stands up, moving to the chalkboard and begins to settle down the class to begin teaching. He can hear his classmates whispering, sees them pointing right at him.

Stan adjusts his glasses.

To his mother's dismay, Stan doesn't take off those glasses for nine years. When he wakes up in the morning, his eyes stay scrunched closed until he reaches over to grab his glasses to push them on. He wears a facemask over his eyes when he sleeps, just in case. In seventh grade a girl tries to reach up and pull them off, and he slaps her across the face. WHen he's fourteen he dates a boy, one that wears sunglasses in protest just like him. The boy finds his soulmate after four months and dumps him. Stan shrugs it off. Anyone who would go crazy for their soulmate like that after claiming to be against it isn't worth his time.

People give him looks on the street, some who are also wearing sunglasses come up and give him a handshake and a clap on the back. Those who defy their soulmates seem to be akin with one another. He pools over books in the library, reading stories of those who never see color for their entire lives and are perfectly contented. He sees others who lost the colors at some point. He wonders if he should show one to his mother, but changes his mind.

When Stan is sixteen, he meets Richie.

Richie is a ball of messy hair and innuendo. Constantly making a scene. His jeans were much too baggy and tore down at his ankles. His obnoxious bomber jacket he never took off was much too big and the sleeved pooled at his wrists. He was constantly writing on himself, arms covered in whatever notes or dumb doodles(mostly dicks) he felt was necessary sticking on his body. He would throw his arms around Stan's shoulders whist cracking some joke, and Stan would roll his eyes, even though he almost always thought it was funny. That was their thing, and Stan liked it a lot. He liked Richie a lot.

They met when Richie the first day of sophomore art class while they were using box cutters. Papercraft wasn't Stans strongest suit, but he was alright. Richie was at the table in front of him, a gigantic, perfect slice right down his palm, spurting blood on everything nearby. Everyone that sat with him had been screaming, and through a wince of pain, Richie held out his hand and pointed to the wet paper towel that Stan had gotten to clean up some spilled glue on his table.

“Hey, can I borrow that?”

Stan froze for a moment, and in the meantime Richie reached out and grabbed the towel from his hand. The art instructor came running over, shoving him out of the room in the direction of the nurse's office. The room buzzed with energy as they all caught up on what happened, but all Stan could think about was the pair of thick-framed sunglasses that covered Richie's face.

Stan offered the art instructor to bring Richies backpack to the nurses office after class was over. She looked up at him, moving her head from her hands, and gave an exhausted ‘thank you’ before returning to her previous position. Stan grabbed Richie's backpack (it was tearing at the seams. It looked like Richie had been using it since ancient rome), turning the corner to the main office. He cautiously stepped into the dimly lit nurses office. The nurse questioned him, but he simply explained he was dropping off Richies backpack and she pointed to the back corner.

Richie looked up and grinned after he watched Stan step over and put his bag beside the seat he was sitting in.

“You’re an idiot,” is the first thing Stan says to him. Richie gives a shit-eating grin. 

“Well, aren’t we feisty?”

Stan rolls his eyes, and Richie somehow sees it though both of their glasses and laughs. Stan manages to crack the tiniest of smiles. “Thanks for the paper towel, by the way.”  
Stan shrugs, retorting with, 

“I never gave it to you. The glue was more important to me than your nerves getting cut in half.”

Richie laughs again. Stan might be okay with this.

They never talk about the glasses. Stan, despite his, can see people’s eyes, but not Richies. The combination of the two both wearing heavy black sunglasses makes it perfectly impossible for Stan to see Richies eyes whatsoever. Richie mentions, at one point when Bill jokes of how thick his lenses are, that his sunglasses are prescription. He quips that he’s legally blind without them, and Stan actually thinks that could be true, based on how god-awfully heavy they are. Stan wishes he could see Richie's eyes, however. He can never seem to read Richies thoughts.

Later, Richie introduces Stan to one of his friends, Eddie.

Eddie is a tiny, angry boy with three bottles of hand sanitizer on his belt at all times and a serious germ problem. Stan had never met such a hypochondriac in his life. However, Eddie was incredibly responsible and typically pretty funny, even though his overbearing mother tries to suppress the ladder. Stan has no idea how Richie and Eddie ever became friends.

Richie looks at Eddie in this one particular way. His shoulders scrunch up and he has this soft, warm smile, as if Eddie hung the stars himself.. Stan can't see Richie's eyes but he's sure there probably glittering. RIchie throws an arm around Eddie's shoulders constantly, and stand silently pushed down the lump in his throat. He isn't sure why, but everytime he sees that smile he feels something is off.

They all sit down at lunch together one day, and as Eddie looks up at Bill, his jaw drops, and boom! Soulmates. Stan is happy for Bill as his friend cried tears of joy, holding both of Eddie's hands tight in his own. Stan tries to sneak a look at Richie, but Richie has a quiet, blank, tight lipped smile.

Later that day, as Richie is waving Stan off where their walks home together split off, he wraps his arms around Stan's neck and hugs him. Stan isn’t sure if it’s to comfort he or Richie himself, but it’s the first time they’ve been this close, so Stan loops his arms around Richies back and holds him. When Richie let's go, he gives a giant grin.  
“I’m really happy for Eds. Bill seems like, perfect for him.” Richie digs his hands into his pocket, fidgeting awkwardly. Stan nods. “Poor Bill though, Eds is gonna be wrapping him in bubble wrap and bathing him in bleach until he’s on his deathbed!”

Stan can’t see Richie's eyes, but with the way he’s awkwardly shuffling around and clenching his fists stan is pretty sure he’s gonna cry. Stan pulls Richie back in by the nape of his neck, snaking an arm on Richie's back again. He presses Richie's head onto his shoulder, and Richie is grabbing fistfuls of Stan's jacket.  
Nothing seems to move. All Stan can hear is Richie's shaky breathing close to his neck, the rolling of cars in the distance. It’s too cold for any birds to be calling. Richies glasses are digging into his shoulder uncomfortably. Stan runs his fingers through Richie's hair. When Richie pulls away once again, he readjusts his glasses on his face and gives another obnoxious smile. “Haven’t gotten that much action in a while, huh, Uris?”

Stan looks at him. He can never quite understand him, how he's unraveling yet acting as if it's nothing. Cracking a huge smile to hide the cracking in his heart… yet, Stan relates in a way. Being the ‘perfect son’ to his parents was exhausting, but he held it together. For the most part. Richie punches him in the arm and walks off, waving goodbye over his shoulder. Stan watches him disappear around the corner of the street, but he stays still, staring at the sidewalk Richie’s old sneakers had traded on. He wondered how long Richie had had feelings for Eddie.

Stan realizes one day how little of Richie's face he can really see.

Not only is Richie wearing those giant glasses that cover most of the top half of his face, his mess of hair frames his face in such a way Stan doesn’t really know the shape of his head. Stans glasses made parts of Richie's face a bit burred, or distorted from scratches on them from years of use. Stan turns his head to the side a little bit, trying to ‘accidentally’ catch a glimpse of Richie out of the corner of his eye. Richie turns and looks back and him, and Stan awkwardly looks down back at whatever page of his biology textbook he was on. Richie leans over to him, pointing to a particularly weird picture of a squirrel climbing a tree. It’s looking at the camera with wide eyes. 

“That’s you.”

Stan smiled and punched him in the arm. Richie laughed, pulling away to say something dumb to Mike, who was sitting on the other side of him.  
There were so many things Stan likes about Richie. He didn’t get offended by his weird jokes, He filled every room and never made Stan feel insecure about anything, ever. He, in a way, admires him. Richie is able to hold it together in situations where Stan would crumble apart. He was exceptionally smart, regardless of how much he actually liked to downplay it. He never asks Stan why he wears the sunglasses. Stan wants to wrap an arm around him, the way Richie did to him. He wanted to reach over and hold Richies hand in his own. Their dumb thoughts, for people who believe in soulmates. Richie turns back, and smiles, and makes another dumb joke, and Stan feels dread building in his gut. Stan wonders how long he’s liked Richie. 

Stan finds himself watching Richie after that. Well, not in a creepy way, at least he hopes not. Tilting his head at weird angles to try and get the clearest view of him possible. He tries to sit back, getting a view of Richies profile and maybe see his eyes, but Richie will lean back even more to prevent that. Stan wants to see Richies face, run his fingers through his hair, rest his hand on Richie's cheek. He wants to take off his glasses, to see Richie for real as he is. He wants to look into Richie's eyes.  
Stan shakes the thought away. He feels like he’s going to throw up. Richie leans over to him.

“You good dude? Your totally spacing out.”

Stan shifts.

“I’m thinking about all the ways I could kill you and get away with it.”

A random teacher makes a face as she walks by, but Richie just laughs.

“Aww, Stanny, if you killed me you’d lose all of the excitement in your life!”

“The adrenaline would make it perfectly exciting.”

Richie smirked and flicked a strand of curls away from Stan's forehead.

“You’d miss me.”

Stan smiled at that one. 

“The peace and quiet would make the loneliness worth it.”

Richie laughs and starts blabbing on suddenly about some court case he saw on TV of a guy that murdered his best friend. Richie was always interested in that stuff, for whatever reason. Stan didn’t mind, he thought it was kind of intriguing too. He wondered if, in Richie's weird world, telling him about that story was Richies way of confirming they were best friends.

Music was the only thing that ever seemed to bring any kind of color into Stan's life. When he has his headphones on, the walls seem less suffocatingly white, the sky less likely to fall. So, when Richie is shoving a cd into his hand, he feels something settling in his chest. Richie makes some joke about how Stan needs to listen to something other than dad music. Stan punches him in the arm. Richie smiles at him in this weirdly warm, familiar way. He listens to the cd on repeat for weeks.

Stan pulls up to Richie's house around 3, rain sputtering onto the hood of his car. He barely spots his friend, sitting on the porch with his knees pulled tight to his chest. He knows Richie probably wouldn’t be able to see him other than the movement of his headlights, so he honks the horn once. Richie jumps, looking up and pulling his bag on his shoulder and stumbling through the rain to the passenger door. Stan didn’t know exactly what happened, just that Richie didn’t want to be in his house anymore and if he could come over. Stan had had his jacket on before Richie could even hang the phone on the receiver. 

Richie looks like a ghost. Stan can still see lights on in the house. He sits there for a few moments,trying to form words to make Richie feel better, but he finds none. Richie is looking dead ahead, head swaying slightly as if his thoughts were too heavy for his neck. Stan pulls out of the driveway and turns the corner. His house wasn’t far, a two minute drive at most. Richie tilts his head a bit, looking at Stan, who’s trying to focus on the road(driving at night with sunglasses on was not an easy task). In the silence, Stan feels his hand closest to Richie being pulled from the wheel, cold fingers being intertwined with his own as Richie drew their hands close to his own chest. Neither says anything, not even when they pull up to Stan's front door. Reluctantly, their hands pull apart, leaving Stan's own cold where Richies had been. 

Stan forces Richie into sleeping in his bed that night while he took the floor. Any other time they would have fought for hours over it, but Richie seemed too tired to care. He didnt even change out of his jeans as he slouched onto Stan's mattress, blanket less. Stan turns off the lights and settles onto the floor. Before he closes his eyes, he hears his mattress creek, and Richie is looking down, facing him. In the dimmest of lighting, Stan sees this smile, this soft and warm smile as if Stan had hung the stars himself. Stan feels his breath hitch, but Richie turns over once again, leaving him to wonder if he had even seen it at all.

When Stan wakes up the next morning, Richie is curled up beside him. His glasses are askew, exposing one of his closed eyes. They aren’t touching, but just a hair away from it, and Stan resists everything in my body from reaching out and caressing Richies cheek. He knows Richie wouldn’t want that. Richie was anti-soulmate… Stan wasn’t so sure if he was too, anymore.

They don’t talk about it.

However, when Stan opens his locker the following Monday, inside is a brand new glasses repair kit, with a leather case and shiney, intricate looking tools. It’s a wild difference from the rusty old ones he had been using since he found it in the attic. Underneath it is a tiny note.

‘Stan the man,  
I was gonna give this 2 ya for ur birthday but i thought I would give it to u now.  
-rich’

Stan stares at it for a long time, before gently tucking the new case into his backpack. He tosses the old one out at a nearby trash can. He wonders what color the leather actually is, but he would never admit it to anyone.

Richie is a shitty teacher.

For someone who scored the highest on the main standardized math test for high schoolers in Maine ever, he was really bad at teaching. If it were a talent to be this bad, Richie would be a millionaire.

“Well, you uh, you take that and you put it there, and then you do the thing.”

“Okay, Richie, but what’s the thing?”

“You know! The thing!”

Stan just huffed and shoved his paper back into his bag.

“I’m just gonna ask Mike for help.”

Richie raises his hands in defense.

“Hey! You already knew I suck at explaining things!”

Stan rolls his eyes, pulling his bag over his shoulder. Richie sits up on the table, propping his feet on one of the chairs.

“I gotta go to fifth. Are you coming?”

Richie is chewing on the eraser of a pencil.

“Nah, I gotta wait for Eddie. We’re doing a scene for theater we gotta work on.”

Stan feels his shoulders stiffen. He had talked to Eddie for a while now, but Richie and he hadn’t really hung out much, apparently. Eddie had been too tangled up in Bill, and vice-versa.

“Yeah… how are you…” Stan flails his arms for a sec before deciding on, “...dealing with that?”

Richie raises an eyebrow before leaning back on his hands.

“Never been better,” he replies, and Stan is actually convinced. “It’s been like a year and a half, I’m over it.”

Stan took a moment to process that, before looking up and realizing it had in fact been more than a year since bill and Eddie had found each other. Time moved like crazy these days, it seemed. Stan bites his lips. Richie is looking at him in an expectant way, with that one smile on his face, but Stan just sputters a simple,  
“Okay. I’ll see you later.”

Stan turned and tumbled out the library doors, Richie waving after him as he left. As hes stomping down the stairs, he turns the corner and sees two girls near the window- Sydney and Marissa. Marissa has third period with him, so she smiles and waves. Sydney is leaning her head on Marissas shoulder. Stan haves back and hurries off to class. He sits at his desk, and tries to imagine what colors the walls are when they aren’t grey.

Stan finds a tiny slip of paper in an old box. It’s a ripped out picture of a box with a single grey color inside. He digs more and finds the paper it was torn from, with different colors on it with a square, a label below what was ripped that said ‘red’.

Stan shoved the box under his bed and tries not to think about it. 

Richie comes over to hang out one late night. Stans dad was out making a personal visit to Stans grandmother, and his mother was having a ‘girls night’ with her friends. Based on how said nights typically went when they were hosted in Stans family’s living room, it would be mostly wine and half-drunken charades. Stan and Richie settled down on the floor in front of the couch to watch a movie. They ignored it quickly though, shifting to face each other as they leaned up against the couch cushions. Richie is describing some endeavor with Mike from the following evening, and Stan is trying to pay attention, but his thoughts keep drifting, until he awkwardly sputters,

“Why do you wear glasses?”

Richie stops for a second, before that dumb, shit-eating grin crawls up his face.

“I need them to see, Stanthony. Why else would I-”

“You know what i mean, Richanold.”

Richie purses his lips for a second.

“Why do you wear them?”

Stan ponders that for a second.  
“I didn't think my soulmate was worth finding.”

Richie leans his chin on his hand. “You didn't answer my question, though.” Richie actually frowns this time, looking down at the carpet.

“Same thing.”

They both go silent for a moment. RIchie cracks his knuckles.

“How long have you been wearing them?”

Stan realizes now that he broke their little unspoken promise of keeping the sunglasses thing unspoken. Richie looks back up at him.

“Like, three years. What about you?”

“Eight years.”

Richie, for once, actually looks taken aback. For the first time in his life, he has no witty remark, muttering,

“Oh, wow.”

They go silent again. Richie sits up, adjusting his glasses on his face, and boldly asks, “Do you wanna take them off?”  
Stan wets his lips but does not contemplate much before replying, 

“Yeah, a lot.”

Stan quickly jumps up and lowers the lights(if they both just ripped them off they would probably go blind because of years of wearing the damn things), and ducks down next to Richie in what feels like no time at all. Richie is holding his glasses by the frames, and Stan realizes he might be shaking as much as himself. Stan feels the unsureness creeping up his skin.

“Should we like… Go on three, or something?”

“Uhh, yeah, I guess…”

Richie scoots a little closer, and Stan awkwardly leans in. He feels like he's gonna throw up. “Okay...one...two..”

Stan tug the frames from his face. He feels like his entire body is on fire. He squeezes his eyes closed, and they get hitched on his ears for a moment. He tugs one more time, and his face feels completely and utterly barren. He forces himself to pry his eyes open. Even in the dim lighting of a single dinky lamp in the corner of the room, it feels like the sun is shooting directly into his retinas. He feels Richie grasp at the front of his shirt.

“Whoa, dude…”

Stan manages to look up. Richie is looking around, eyes wide, blinking over and over. "I haven't seen things this bright in forever." His glasses are propped up on his head. He has long, dark eyelashes that framed his squinty eyes. His mess of hair falls just above his eyebrows. Stan feels his heart swell as he realizes Richie is a thousand times more beautiful than he had imagined in his head. His head is whipping around all over the place, taking in everything he can see.

Stan lets his eyes flicker around as well. The wall is grey, the tv is black, the door is grey, Richies hair is grey. Stan cautiously reaches up, putting his hands on richie's face. Richie looks away, eyes flickering everywhere except Stan's face. Stan purses his lips. Richie looks down at him, managing to avoid his eyes. He opens his mouth, as if to say something, but Stan feels his courage spike as he lurches forward and kisses him. Their teeth clack a little, and it hurts like a bitch, but Stan ignores it. Richie is pressing his hands on Stan's back, and their legs are awkwardly bumping into each others as they pulled each other closer. Richie is trying so hard to be as close as possible Stan is being pushed backwards. He finally presses his hand onto Richie's chest, gently pushing him away. They both take a moment to breathe, Richie turns his head away. Stans hand is still on Richies chest, and Richie puts his hand over it. Stan grips the collar of his shirt.

“Richie…”

Richies eyes flicker back to him, but he doesn't look at his eyes.  
“Wh-what if we’re disappointed?”

Stan gnaws on his bottom lip.

“So what? We never cared about it up until now…” Richie looks down at Stans hand on his chest. “It’ll just prove soulmates are bullshit.” Stan reaches up with his other hand, tucking a lock of unruly hair behind Richie's ear. Richie takes a deep breath. He turns his head away one last time, before straightening up.

“Okay.” He cracks a smile as his eyes flicker around. “I hope you know if we aren't, it changes nothing. You can't get rid of me that easily.”

Stan just laughs. Richie reaches over, tilting Stans chin up.

Richies eyes are golden brown, like the sun cascading over a vast, stretching ocean. Stan feels tears beginning to prick his eyes as Richie throws his arms around him again, gasping with relief. 

Stan can't wait to see what ‘red’ looks like.

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact.... i dont like soulmate aus!!! i dont like the idea that fate tells u who u gotta b with , idk, thats just me. i wanted to make a fic where the characters didnt like the soulmate thing either. im not toally pleased whith how this came out, but im so ehausted by it at this point im just throwin in the towel. thx for the read! i know the characterizations kinda off, im not very good at writing stan. I plan to work on it.


End file.
